Brahimi has been on the job for more than a year now, talking about talking, while in Syria the carnage, and the spillover, has gotten ever worse, with al Qaeda affiliates honing their battle skills among the opposition. Meanwhile, while Hezbollah and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps have come to the aid of the Assad regime, Russia has shipped in weapons. Also, there are reports of North Korea ramping up help to the regime.

On August 21st came the worst chemical weapons attack yet, in which according to the White House the regime killed more than 1,400 people, 426 of them children. The UN Security Council held an emergency meeting (which the new U.S. ambassador, Samantha Power, did not manage to attend), and the result was… nothing. This week, the five permanent members of the Security Council held a closed-door meeting on Syria (this time, Power was present), and the result, once again, was… nothing. What matters in the UN universe is not the agony of war, or the actual violations on the ground of international taboos, but such stuff as the preferences of veto-wielding members of the Security Council. Russia and China simply won’t play ball. Game over.

Of course, the UN is expected to soon produce a report from its team of chemical weapons experts, who finally got into Syria these past two weeks. Theirs was a brave mission, in which they came under sniper fire while trying to make their rounds. But the price of their admission, haggled out over the past few months between the UN and the Assad regime, was that their mandate does not require them to decide who used chemical weapons; they were allowed in merely to determine whether chemical weapons were used at all. In this, they have been greatly preempted by the White House press briefing that just reported “with high confidence,” plus a map of the attacks, that the Syrian regime, with Bashar Assad as “the ultimate decision maker,” had launched multiple chemical weapons attacks, previously on a small scale, and on August 21st on a far bigger scale.

If anything is to be done about the use of chemical weapons for mass murder, that leaves the U.S., and any allies President Obama can muster, to deal with these atrocities. It’s an open question whether Obama, when he does make up his mind, will decide on action that makes any kind of strategic sense, or will choose simply to stir this hornet’s nest. But for the moment, at least, it has become virtually impossible to hide behind the UN. That does not by any stretch guarantee a good result, or even a least bad result. There are widely varying views over what, if anything, should now be done. But the benching of the UN at least allows room for some clarity of debate, responsibility, and decision. That’s a step in the right direction.

He's dragging out his decision-making process as long as possible. His administration is happy to have media attention taken away from their corruption for awhile, but Obama is reveling in the opportunity to pose as a real "president" while the world is in a state of suspension waiting for him to make his decision. He is indeed mentally unbalanced and becoming more so every day. What we are seeing unfold is terrifying.

If you can't rate it, you won't replace it and you will only have a weak incentive to reform it.

We do not have an objective measure to rate the UN. We need one. At the bottom of the scale should be "this is as bad as the League of Nations" and at the top, well, I'm not sure yet what the top would look like. Perhaps it would be "lives up to the sales pitch". It would be an integral part of the still nonexistent machinery to replace the UN with something better.

UN = A gaggle of mouth-breathing tin-pot dictatorships getting rich off of us and getting their jollies by poking us in the collective eye.

Plow the damn building into the river. We are broke. We don't have the money to pay for more than 1/5 of the UN's operating expenses. And we certainly do NOT have the patience to invite these bastards to our shores to lecture and berate our great country.

The UN didn't suddenly become useless because the Syrian debacle and the inability to 'do something'. It didn't suddenly become useless because Libya was appointed head of the UN's human rights council. Neither did it become suddenly useless because of the failure to act in Rwanda or from the Oil for Food fraud that made Cofi and his cohorts rich. It is because of all these things - and all of the other things as well - tales that have never made the light of day - all lumped together - that you get the real picture of what is wrong with the UN - why it should be removed from our shores and never allowed to return. One word that perfectly sums up the UN is corruption.

I get the feeling that should China and Russia not have a stage in which to tweak the noses of the American leadership they'd be at each other's throats more often than they are currently. IMO thats a good thing. Jackass countries across the world might follow suit. I say let em fight!

It matters not where one puts the den of thieves. It matters who pays the bills. And the U.S. pays the bills. I say let them have their club of nattering naybobs of nihilistic visions and let them pay for their insanity. I personally think that the U.N. would fit perfectly Vienna.

I don't understand the notion that Russia and China could have "reduced the UN to irrelevance in the Syria conflict." The UN either does or does not bestow legitimacy on military interventions and other acts of foreign policy. If it does, then we have no right to intervene in Syria as long as we don't have UN approval -- period. And if it does not, then the UN is, and has been, irrelevant regardless of what Russia and China do. But you can't treat the UN as the arbiter and source of legitimacy just when you like its decisions and otherwise ignore it.